A Dirge for the Temporal Read Online Free PDF Page B

diversity .

    ~

      The city got its name from the melting pot of cultures and languages and peoples that Swiss Geneva was. Only the namesake was to be an even more civilized, more organized, more modern-day Babel. unity in diversity . Lane looked around him and he saw exactly one half of that equation, to the extent that he suddenly felt physically distanced from Leah, who was right beside him, her hand grasped tightly in his. The eyes she turned on him told tales of their own. The concrete color had dissolved to make way for the iridescence which he had seen on occasion, a quivering rainbow stolen from the armor of a beached fish in the sun’s glare. Or from the swamp lights drifting within New Geneva’s poisonous nimbus.
      Before them, along a narrow street cut in half by shadow, the corruption unfolded. Bloated men on stick legs pecked about like chickens, looking for anything into which they might stab their beaks. Sleek favor girls—fingers glistening with the adhesive they used to secure their deposits—stuck their bottom lips out in a contest of who could pout the loudest. From neomodernrococo upper windows in the flanking walls, buxom citywives yelled down at their husbands and sons not to bring anything raunchy home, or they’d put them out with the garbage. The word garbage was instantly absorbed into the refuse spilling out from the crevices between business concerns. The entrances of these establishments were vague outlines behind exhaled vapors. A street in New Geneva was like the canal through which a fart traveled, without the expulsion of air.
  Leah must have had one of these joints in mind all along; otherwise they would have already been in the city center, with its fake antique European walls and cobblestone avenues. Someone knew something about something. Lane trusted her judgment implicitly, even though he was the infiltrator by trade. The sunken inner door didn’t fit well in its frame; dried up posters clung to flaking paint; the withins were dark and full of Miles Davis riffs and ripoffs.
      Over the sounds of the trumpet, a slurred voice made itself audible, addressing the player. “You are my man Miles, ain’t ya? Goddamn, how did you find your way here to the Jazzy Sloth?”
      The Jazzy Sloth. Indeed, where else would one be?
      Leah went straight to the bar, something of the mood of the place appearing in her eyes as she leaned up on her toes and elbows to address the bartender, whose back was turned to them. “Joy, it’s me. Leah.”
      “Leee-uh!” exclaimed a sandpaper voice as the woman twirled. “Hello, you beautiful bitch!”
      “I’m back to reclaim what belongs to me,” Leah said plainly. “Joy, let me introduce you to Lane. Lane is my…he is my Lane.”
      Lane felt a patter of delicate little feet race through him, hearing this confession from her.
      “Wait a minute,” said Joy in her abrasive voice. “You’re the one Leah hired to find her sister Gena.”
      “Yeah,” said Lane. Hearing the name reminded him that their mother had spelled it with an e so that it read like an abbreviation of Geneva, in honor of the splendid modern city where the sisters had been born.
      “Did you?”
      “She was a spiegel .” He looked over at Leah, whose eyes were the lightest suggestion of blue as they gazed at the trumpeteer on stage. He continued, “I forced her to come, nearly had to drag her, but we didn’t make it.”
      “She do herself?”
  “ Fuck !” Leah let out unexpectedly. For the scattered patrons, she might have been hurling her frustrations at the musician. Joy passed Lane a protracted glance.
      It had been the last gig for Lane. For years he had been entering the city, finding them and bringing them out—or not bringing them out. The whole operation had come to an end when Gena, a not so random number, threw herself under a passing vehicle’s tires. He didn’t realize his level of investment until he delivered the news to Leah,